Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Coppola Vincent
Title : Dragons of god A Journey Through Far-Right America
Year : 1996

Link download : Coppola_Vincent_-_Dragons_of_god.zip

Mountain Home, Arkansas. In the dawn of 1984, I stood on the frozen shores of Bull Shoals Lake in northern Arkansas searching for the place. Zarepath Horeb, the survivalist community called itself, a name taken from a Biblical site where ritual purification took place. Locals, however, referred to the commune as the "Jonestown of the Ozarks." With good rea son as it turned out. In 1984, I was a reporter sent to cover the outbreak of far-right violence that was seemingly flaring up all over the country. It had begun a year earlier when a 63-year-old North Dakota grandfather named Gordon Kahl slaughtered two federal marshals and wounded three others who'd tried to arrest him on a minor tax violation. Kahl, a member of a shadowy antigovernment organization called the Posse Comitatus, somehow eluded a massive manhunt for six months. On June 3, 1983, he was cornered a few miles from where I now stood. Kahl murdered again: this time a popu lar Arkansas sheriff, Gene Matthews, who had tried to talk him into surrendering. Kahl was incinerated in the onslaught that followed. Oddly, the farmhouse, actually a fortified bunker, where Kahl took refuge belonged to 61- year-old Leonard Ginter and his 58-year-old wife, Norma. They considered the murderer a hero. In the months ahead, the nation would be rocked by a series of bloody and sensational crimes linked to an array of extrem ist groups. In the South, the KuKluxKlan wascalling for armed revolution, its members swapping their sheets for camouflage fatigues. Farmers, suffering the worstcrisis since the Depression, were shouting about conspiracies involving Zionists and inter national bankers. Some were picking up guns to defend their homesteads. In Idaho, members of a neo-Nazicell led by Robert Matthews were planning the assassination of liberal Denver talk-radio host Alan Berg, a crime they committed, then fol lowed with a spree of terror bombings, shootings and robberies intended to trigger a fascist revolution. Like the pristine forests of the Pacific Northwest, the som nolent green belt stretching across northern Arkansas and southern Missouri had become home to hundreds of extrem ists: survivalists, religious fanatics worshipping an Aryan Christ, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen and nascent "patriot" militias. One of the most bizarre and violent of these groups, Zarepath Horeb, better known as The Covenant, the Sword, the Arm of the Lord (CSA), had brought me to the lakeshore. "That's it," Gene Irby said, pointing to a cluster of buildings barely visible across the shore front. "Where?" I said, straining to see through the swirling, windblown snow. Irby was an Arkansas state trooper, one of the few outsiders the CSA communards deigned to acknowledge. In Little Rock, his boss, Colonel Tommy Goodwin, had arranged for me to ride with Irby to Bull Shoals Lake, an assignment that didn't exactly thrill the officer. I was hoping he could get me inside the camp. Irby took a deep breath, started the car and we were off. Snow covered the rutted roads, frozen streams cracked and groaned as we crisscrossed the lake's tangled shores. Inlets and promontories, veined by unmarked, dead-end roads, slowed us to a crawl. January's pale light was fast dis appearing, and, with it, any hope of reaching the place before dark. Not a soul stirred; no sound echoed on the great lake but the shuffing tires of Irby's police cruiser and the faint crackle of its radio. ...